Why We Should Reacquaint Ourselves with William Blake

William Blake, who lived from 1757 to 1827, was born into a world in turmoil, not unlike our own. He was a poet and painter, now often linked with figures from the Romantic movement, including William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ralph Waldo Emerson later praised Blake for displaying “abnormal genius.” However, there was barely a year in Blake’s life unspoiled by what, in his long poem, Vala, or The Four Zoas, he called “thunder smoke & sullen flame & howling & fury & blood.” In particular, he lived through the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars, which killed untold numbers across Europe and the New World.

Life in Britain was marked by strife, too. His hometown of London was the booming heart of the British Empire. New ideas and influences came to England’s capital alongside wealth, and this included religious ideas from India, as well as encounters with Indigenous Americans. These stirred Blake’s interest in alternatives to the deepening materialism of the times, which he saw both in the sense of a growing consumer desire to own material things and in the philosophical sense of perceiving the world to be made, at base, of matter rather than being an expression of divine mind.

He witnessed the birth pangs of the modern, plural world, and, moreover, understood what was unfolding—dynamics that are still active today. This is why his genius can help us now. His verse and imagery offer a spiritual analysis of our times that is immensely useful and revolves around a single notion: imagination. Understanding the workings of the imagination, Blake says, allows us to appreciate what is happening right before our eyes.

Blake perceived that imagination drives all human desires, individually and collectively. What is now manifest was first imagined, he stressed. But while this faculty of inventiveness and inspiration can lead us to great goods, it can also be mistaken and become unwittingly destructive.

Consider one of his best-known paintings. Newton, which was first completed in 1795, depicts the famous natural philosopher Isaac Newton sitting on a stone seat, bending over a scroll, wielding a pair of compasses. He is drawing geometric shapes that capture the secrets of the universe. And this is an accurate depiction because, in the Georgian period, Newton’s discoveries seemed little short of miraculous. 

But Blake shows something else. His Newton is also submerged, as if at the bottom of a sea. His stone seat is a rock on which vibrant algae and waving anemones live. But such is the focus of Newton’s gaze that he has grown oblivious to—and become uncoupled from—the life around him. Blake shows Newton loving his version of the world more than the world itself.

In a letter to his friend and patron, Thomas Butts, Blake called this absorption “single vision and Newton’s sleep.” In Blake’s painting, Newton stares at his scroll as today someone might look at a screen. His vision has narrowed to simulations and inventions. 

Two centuries on, many people have ready access to the kind of computing power that enables them to spend a significant portion of each day dwelling in representations of reality, which they often seem to prefer. This is to abide among “dark Satanic Mills,” Blake would say, to quote another of his famous lines. He meant “Satanic” as the mentality that forgets how to care for much other than consumption and production. But the question for us is: How can we avoid Newton’s sleep and, where it has taken hold, awaken from it?

Blake believed that the key is to realize that the imagination is not a faculty of human minds, as if somehow extruded by the brain or body—as, for example, is the assumption when people say that imagination belongs to the individual: You might have it, or me, or an artist, probably in greater measure. No. Blake insisted something else: Imagination is active in us all—and not just all of us, but in everything that lives. 

“Nature is imagination itself!” he declared in response to a letter from a critic. Blake asserted that the people and things we meet echo, reflect, and share in the living intelligence and creativity that run through the panoply of existence. Moreover, being in touch with that energy, which does not belong to us but with which we can wonderfully collaborate, is the way truly to satisfy our longings and desires. 

His poems, of which perhaps the most famous begins, “Tyger Tyger, burning bright,” are full of phrases that inspire this fuller participation. That connection is found by taking the time to contemplate the vitality that surrounds us: “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way/is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” 

Or there is another well-known verse: 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour.

We may not be fully sure what he means by such intimations, but the words call to us, promising that we can and will.

Two details are crucial to realize this path: one personal, the other political.

The personal one has to do with desire. Blake advised against responding to the excesses of modern life by either trying to suppress desires or control people through moralizing. He feared that if people curtail their desires, they diminish their humanity. Better to adopt this dictum, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” People go astray, for sure. But desire can also be educated, through mistakes, as well as poetry and imagery.

The political element follows from this embrace of life. “Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish,” Blake insisted. A society does well when the arts do well, alongside the sciences. The conviction inspired subsequent writers from Northrop Frye to Harold Bloom and is not just a romantic flourish. 

The point is that the imagination stirs us and others for good and ill, whether we like it or not. But when we recognize imagination as continually active within us, its energy can join what liberates rather than condemns.

Mark Vernon is the author of Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination.